Just about everyone has more domains and forests than what they want – than if they could start over today with a clean slate. The reasons are many:

Mergers and acquisitions

The guy/gal who originally designed our Active Directory didn’t know what they were doing and is long gone

If we knew then, what we know now…

Dedicated forest root domain that turned out to be not so important

The domain security boundary that turned out not to exist

Active Directory and security go hand-in-hand. Consolidating and eliminating domains without proper planning can kill your security. On the other hand limping along with an unwieldy AD structure kills security too.

In this webinar presented by Randy Franklin Smith, he’ll take a detailed look at what it takes to merge AD domains and forests and then manage them securely.

He will cover all kinds of issues, including:

Lack of standards and consistency between existing domains/forests to be merged

Desktops/BYOD/endpoints

Applications dependent on user’s domain identity

Which apps and systems use this domain that is slated for deletion?

Group clean up

What is this domain/forest syncing with? Which direction(s)

Schema modifications

Preserving security boundaries

The biggest success factors with AD consolidation are:

Documenting all the dependencies on AD

Cleaning up and merging objects

Tools to automate the above

Using virtual directory technologies to allows a phased consolidation instead of a single, traumatic rip and repair weekend

Consolidating domains and forests is a big job that requires a lot of assessment and planning but you’ve got to do it, otherwise everything else you maintain and deploy is going to be hindered by the current unwieldy AD environment. It’s like trying to run a race with a car stuck in first gear. You’ve got to stop and take time to fix that transmission. But if you know what you are doing and invest in the right tools you can make that repair much faster and less expensive. And that’s our goal for this webinar. Quest is sponsoring it and will show how they can help.

Once you get AD cleaned up and consolidated – then what? How do you keep AD clean, secure, up-to-date and managed well for efficiency and compliance?